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Cold gas in galaxies: single-dish surveys in the SKA era

A detailed knowledge of how gas cycles in and around galaxies, and how it depends on their structural and star formation properties, as well as environment, is crucial to understand galaxy formation and evolution. This requires sensitive surveysof cold gas for representative samples of galaxies, able to probe the gas-poor regime. I will present results based on the recently completed, extended GALEX Arecibo SDSS Survey (xGASS), which includes the deepest observations of cold gas in galaxies currentlyavailable, and will discuss results obtained via spectral stacking of the largest stellar mass-selected sample with atomic hydrogen data assembled to date. I will argue that,even in the era of the Square Kilometre Array and its precursors, there are important scientific areas where large single-dish telescopes such as Arecibo and FAST can uniquely contribute.

Speaker:

Barbara Catinella

International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, University of Western Australia

Speaker Introduction:

Dr Catinella’s main research interest is understanding the role of gas in galaxiesand its connection with their properties and environment. She is an expert in surveys of neutral hydrogen with single-dish telescopes. Her main contributions include leadership of the GALEX Arecibo SDSS Survey (GASS), which quantified for the first time the cold gas scaling relations of local galaxies in terms of stellar mass, structural and star formation properties,and of the HIGHz survey, currently the largest sample of galaxies at redshift z>0.2 withmeasured atomic and molecular hydrogen masses. She also pioneered the application of spectral stacking to the study of gas scaling relations.After being awarded a PhD in astronomy in 2005 by Cornell University in the US, Barbara held postdoctoral positions at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany, and took up a prestigious Future Fellowship at Swinburne University, Australia. She joined the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research at the University of Western Australia in 2015, where she leads the “Gas and feedback with radio surveys” science unit.